Mugs of Glögg

It’s the first day after the solstice and a glorious one at that, the first cloudless sky in who knows how many weeks. Thankfully the days will once again wax. The sun sets around 3:30 p.m. this time of year, which can really throw a South Texas girl off kilter. The Swedes fight the dark with style, though. Big buildings are lit from below in blue and purple, and the streetlamps are covered in orange cellophane. The avenues twinkle with thousands of tiny lights, and windowsills glow with electric candlesticks. There’s an ice-skating rink in the central square, along with warming wood fires, nightly choirs, and a café serving coffee and baked seasonal treats.

The season begins with Christmas markets and really takes off after St. Lucia’s Day. Every weekend in December, shoppers pack narrow cobblestone streets to buy holiday goodies like jam, chocolates, candied nuts, and artisan-made krispbread and cheeses. There are tables filled with locally made gifts like herb-speckled soaps and hand-knit sweaters and mittens. If you need satiation on the spot, they’ve got stalls with warm doughnuts, buns spiced by saffron or anise, and sausages, including veggie varieties. Then you can put your gloves back on your freezing fingers and wash it all down with some steaming glögg (mulled wine with nuts and raisins).

Lucia Day brings with it the most familiar image of Swedish Christmas, girls in long white dresses wearing crowns of evergreen and candles. Boys join in, too, wearing tall white cone-shaped hats adorned with stars. Children wake their families with coffee, raisin-studded saffron buns and a song. Celebrations follow at schools, churches and offices, where little Lucias are designated to lead singing candlelit processions, bringing gentle light to the darkest days of the year.

The jultomta, a little “Christmas gnome” dressed like Santa who tows presents on the back of a goat, arrives on Christmas Eve. He lives in the nearby forest, or even farmers’ barns, and is especially pleased when left a bowl of porridge with a big pat of butter as a thank-you treat. He brings gifts right to the door, so every year a family member or neighbor is enlisted to “go out for the newspaper” and come back bearded and dressed in red. A friend of ours grew up on a street where all the fathers would meticulously schedule trading houses to better conceal the jultomta’s identity. “American parents have it easy!” he said.

Christmas dinner is the julbord, a holiday smorgasbord with ham, sausages and pickled herring in every sort of sauce you can imagine. Our veggie holiday meal will not be so Swedish, but we will be eating pigs. Marzipan pigs, that is! They come in every size (including ones that could rival real pigs), left bare pink or covered in dark chocolate. We’ll stuff ourselves with chestnuts and raise a mug of glögg to our kindred Swedes, and all we love and miss back home. God Jul och God Nytt År! (Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!)